


Death Had The Same Design

by yuletide_archivist



Category: We the Living - Ayn Rand
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-19
Updated: 2006-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 01:20:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1624016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Story by Rook</p>
            </blockquote>





	Death Had The Same Design

**Author's Note:**

> Written for corbeaun

 

 

In Andrei's dream, he is walking in a smear of fog over ground covered in snow. The noise of his boots in the snow is a crunch like the noise of a hundred tiny bones cracking. His breath makes clouds in front of his face, almost imperceptible against the fog.

He looks around for the bodies. This is an old dream, one he has had, on occasion, for years. It follows him into his comfortable rooms, makes strange the painted clouds that float over the ceiling of a room that the District Club has no use for but that once upon a time was the love-nest of a prince; the opulence, he thinks, suits Kira well. There are no bodies. There was no snow when he walked through the fog in reality although the chill air sliced into his lungs, although there should have been, to cover the splotches of blood and the wide expanse of trampled mud with its forgiving white.

It is dark here, the darkness of a world just before the dawn. Somewhere in the fog are soft, deceptive glimmers, that could be the reflection of sun off distant mountains or clouds, or could be nothing but his eyes playing tricks.

After a while he is sure that there is nothing here, that he will wander in this darkness forever; then he sees a red spot on the ground, and stumbles over a crest in the snow that he had no realized was there. The red traces the shape of a woman's breast. He thinks of Kira, and the red dress with the black patent leather trim he bought for her. He can scarcely see through the fog. Stumbling through the fog of Perekop that this dream should have been he had found a man whose soul, he thought, was the same as his own. Kira is not quite the same, but still, he loves her even though she stands against everything he sacrificed his heart to. He reaches her and sees that the red is not the dress he bought her, for she is wearing a wedding dress, delicate white flowing down the lines of her body like a sculpture of a goddess, marred only by the blood covering her chest. She is smiling upwards. Her eyes are open, and she blinks a few times. Andrei trembles, sick with terror.

He reaches out a hand to her, and she lifts her hand and takes it, lifting herself up. "Andrei," she says, sounding a little surprised. "You're here? I thought you'd gone on ahead." He shakes his head fitfully; where could he go without her?

Kira is standing before him now, brushing the edges of the dried blood off her dress. It leaves brown spatters across the snow. Andrei looks down at himself. He is not carrying his gun. Of course he is not carrying his gun; he gave it to Captain Karsavin. There had been so much mud, and the fog was as thick as potato soup almost until the dawn. He looks around them; the fog is beginning to clear. Somewhere in the distance a bright light has risen above the horizon.

The night has, he thinks, been very long. He thinks that perhaps he has been walking for a great distance. Longer than she has. Perhaps that is why he found her here and now; he was walking though the fog for such a great distance, such a tremendous distance, that it took him this long just to catch up. Kira was the thing that kept him walking. There was darkness and mud and fog all around him, and then the snow, and now they are the only things in the world, surrounded by snow and cloud like the clouds on his ceiling, the blank, welcoming white of an empty page waiting for words.

He kisses her, and tastes the blood on her lips. "Come on," he whispers. "We have a long way to go." She nods.

Andrei had lived in the middle of dust and mud. His mother had taken in washing, and the dirty water had dripped from the tubs and trailed across the basement floor in little brown streams. When he carried the tubs to her he splashed through him, because the tubs were big and he could not always see where he was going. In the factory his hands were covered in grease, and then later, when the revolution spun through the streets, his hands were covered in blood sometimes, dirt the rest, because there was always dirt, dirt and mud and blood and all too honest.

There is nothing dirty here. Even the blood has vanished beneath the snow. It is still falling, drifting peacefully down to settle around them, softening the surfaces of the earth.

In Andrei's dream, he kisses Kira again, and she does not close her eyes, does not whisper with pain in her voice that this must be a secret, just for the two of them, cannot be something they can be proud of, the two of them together against the world. She smiles, and takes his hand, and they begin to walk together. There is no longer a fog around them. The hills are soft and white and the sky is turning pink as the sun rises. She is leaning on his shoulder. She is not bleeding any longer, and the red spot on her dress has gone black. Once she stumbles, and he has to put an arm over her shoulders to steady her. He whispers words of encouragement into her ear, and she smiles at him and carefully pushes away, balancing on her own feet. The dress drags around her ankles, leaving a swept mark in the snow behind them. The snow is already thin on the ground. Kira clutches at his shoulder, and he brushes more blood off her dress.

"It's alright," she says. "We'll make it all the way."

Andrei smiles. Ahead of them the snow has vanished, and the earth is thick with opening flowers.

 


End file.
